The GOP Keeps Losing Public Abortion Votes. So It’s Trying an Absurd New Ploy.

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One of the most revealing moments of the 2024 election on abortion came when Missouri, one of the most conservative states in the union, approved a ballot initiative creating constitutional reproductive rights. And yet less than six months later, Republican lawmakers are pushing a new constitutional amendment to overturn the result voters put in place. The Missouri experiment is a reflection of the lessons that abortion opponents have taken from their heavy losses in past ballot fights—and whether efforts to rebrand and modestly change old bans will work, even in the reddest states. For decades, the anti-abortion movement has argued that women should be treated as the second victims of abortion because they don’t understand what they are doing, even if abortion itself is intrinsically wrong. Now, Missouri Republicans are applying the same theory to voters to forgive them for rejecting the GOP’s abortion policy.

Missouri was just the latest ballot initiative loss for the anti-abortion movement. Each defeat has prompted soul-searching among abortion opponents. Some have recognized that voters don’t like bans that begin at fertilization, especially when those laws include harsh criminal penalties. Others blame the losses on voters’ own misunderstanding of the issues, or argue that right-to-lifers were simply outspent. In Ohio, for example, Republicans argued that voters didn’t recognize how broad a right they had ushered in—or how many restrictions would be constitutionally suspect once the ballot initiative was in place. Missouri Republicans are making a similar argument now—with a new wrinkle. Missouri conservatives think voters only opted for Amendment 3, the reproductive rights ballot measure, because the state’s ban didn’t have enough exceptions. And the state GOP is banking on the idea that a sweeping ban can rebranded in a way that voters will like.

The amendment Republicans have proposed would allow for exceptions slightly broader than the ones in the ban that Amendment 3 repealed, including certain severe medical emergencies, fetal abnormalities, and rape and incest (for the latter, survivors would have access only for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy). The amendment would also ban gender-affirming care for minors, which Missouri law already prohibits.

All of that sounds standard for a conservative state like Missouri. The problem is that voters just rejected an abortion ban. Republicans nevertheless are arguing that what they’re doing is anything but undemocratic. Instead, they reason that voters didn’t understand how extreme Amendment 3 was—and didn’t have a real choice because they weren’t offered a middle ground between Amendment 3 and the old ban, which contained only a life exception.

These arguments may sound familiar because the anti-abortion movement has made similar claims to explain why abortion victimizes women. In the 1980s and 1990s, a thriving clinic-blockade movement was damaging the reputation of the anti-abortion movement, especially following an escalation in violence against clinics and providers. The leaders of prominent anti-abortion groups wanted to establish that they weren’t anti-woman, even as they recognized a tension in framing abortion as murder without condemning women for choosing it. To reconcile these tensions, anti-abortion leaders stressed that women didn’t understand what they were choosing. The movement championed “right to know” laws that claimed to inform women of the nature of life in the womb and the medical risks of abortion. Other abortion opponents claimed that most abortions were coerced.

Now, Missouri Republicans are drawing on this playbook to justify ignoring what voters just did. The state GOP reasons that voters didn’t understand what Amendment 3 would permit—and that they opted for it only because they weren’t given a real choice. There may be some truth in the latter. Missouri voters are generally quite conservative, including on abortion, and may prefer what they might see as a middle-ground solution, such as what’s in place in Nebraska, which allows abortion until 12 weeks, or North Carolina, which does the same, subject to a wide array of additional restrictions. But that’s not what Republicans are giving them. The amendment Republicans are proposing would just institute another ban on virtually all abortions, with narrow and probably unworkable exceptions. That’s hardly a banner example of moderation.

What Republicans really might be doing is trying to confuse voters about what they are choosing, all while claiming that misinformation is to blame for the success of Amendment 3. A separate measure the GOP is advancing would give the Legislature the final word on the official description used for ballot measures (a judge had retooled the one used for Amendment 3 after concluding that the Legislature’s was misleading).

And Republicans are trying to make sure their new proposal appeals to voters who might not want a ban on abortion from the moment of fertilization. The proposal moving through the state Legislature asks voters whether they want to “guarantee access to care for medical emergencies, ectopic pregnancies, and miscarriages,” ensure women’s safety, permit parental consent for minors, “allow abortions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, rape, and incest,” “require physicians to provide medically accurate information,” and “protect children from gender transition.” Missourians who aren’t closely following the issue might want to allow abortions for medical emergencies and other reasons and still like the sound of the amendment. Voters might like the idea of banning gender-affirming care for minors without remembering that the state already prohibits it. Most critically, the amendment says nothing about the fact that the amendment would ban all other abortions. There’s some debate about whether the amendment itself would act as a ban or simply allow the Missouri Legislature to pass one, but one thing is clear: It presents itself as a sensible step to the center when it closely resembles the nation’s most sweeping criminal abortion laws.

The truth is that Missouri Republicans know they are ignoring voters and aren’t worried about the consequences. Republicans in Missouri control every lever of government power, and Democrats stand no chance of changing that in the near term. GOP leaders know that Missourians have rejected the party’s position on abortion, but they are betting that voters’ party loyalty is strong enough that they simply won’t do anything about it if Republicans ignore what the state voted for just last year. The new proposal in Missouri isn’t about giving voters a more nuanced choice. It’s a show of force from a party in a state that thinks it has nothing to lose.